Vodafone Business and Serveo have joined forces in a pioneering urban lighting management project, "Light as you Need" (LayN ), an intelligent lighting solution or 'smart lighting' that improves the service offered to citizens and optimizes energy resources by analyzing mobility patterns using Big Data, Analytics and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies.
LayN aims to provide light to users based on their real usage needs, which are determined with large volumes of anonymized data from the Vodafone network, which analyze citizen mobility in a very granular way, simulating tens of millions of lighting curves. Thus, this solution optimizes the configuration of both the existing lighting control mechanisms in the different municipalities, as well as those of the lighting management systems of new installations where Serveo already provides services.
With the implementation of LayN, Serveo enables a data analytics layer of citizen mobility indices provided by Vodafone Analytics. LayN makes it possible to exactly adapt the night lighting control curves to those real needs. In this way, Serveo's expert knowledge in public lighting is combined, together with the data intelligence capabilities of Vodafone Analytics, to achieve an intelligent lighting solution or "smart lighting", which allows energy savings of up to 30%, on top of the savings of over 60% that makes it easy to switch to LED lights/lighting.
It is estimated that implementing LayN in public lighting in a city of 3 million inhabitants would mean annual energy savings equivalent to planting 4 times the number of trees in the Retiro Park in Madrid (approximately 80,000 trees in total). The potential for extra savings that the introduction of a solution such as LayN could entail could be the equivalent of planting 1 tree for every 2 light points where it is applied.
IoT and data analytics
LayN has two key aspects. In the first place, the Internet of Things (IoT), key to the deployment of sensors and actuators implanted in streetlights (edge computing) based on international standards such as ZD4i (Zhaga connector between IoT node and LED luminaire controller, with DALI protocol 2.0) and NB IoT wireless communications (5G Ready, compatible with both 4G and 5G networks) in the luminaires that allow lighting to be controlled. Vodafone has made its IoT solution available to Serveo, where the operator is the national leader with more than 5 million active lines in Spain.
Secondly, the data analytics provided by the Vodafone Analytics tool, an aspect that provides all the anonymized mobility indices of the municipality where it is implemented. In this way, an exponential improvement in the quality of the public lighting service is achieved, taking into account that today there are regulation curves in this area that are very generic and far from the real behavior patterns of citizens, which causes some areas of the same municipality are under-lit and others over-lit at different times of the night.
The solution has been successfully tested in one of the cities operated by Serveo and it is planned to progressively extend it to the rest of the municipalities committed to sustainability and energy efficiency.
Daniel Jiménez, director of Vodafone Business
LayN represents the best combination of technological excellence applied to the sustainability of intelligent urban management, something that Vodafone has already adapted to areas such as mobility, but which has a long history in other many areas such as water management or lighting, among others.
José María Muñoz de Serveo, Serveo's senior manager of energy efficiency and engineering
LayN seeks the real optimization of urban lighting, which results not only in significant economic savings for the citizen, but also in a noticeable reduction in CO2 emission levels, in line with current sustainability standards.
